It's Still Life

16.1 of 27 – Aetherskein: The Fragment: The Unseen Loom

The Shape of a Word

19 August: Back home at an Intersection Named After an English King and a Saint:

Brigid opens her journal to a fresh insert — thread-stitched, soft as confession — and when the pen touches cotton paper, a single drop of ink spreads like silence remembering the shape of her name.

She writes: Myth is the song of civilisation — it teaches us how to endure, how to suffer, how to love — without it, we forget where we stand in the universe; mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical — and though she’s paraphrasing Campbell’s The Power of Myth, a gift from Nick-the-Gatekeeper, the words hum as if they’ve waited centuries to be written in her hand.

This is not history — it is anatomy; not religion, but marrow — the blueprint that lets the soul breathe beneath its borrowed name.

Outside, a crow lands on the windowsill — its wings dripping with old paper and rain — and for a moment, she wonders if even birds carry glyphs in their bloodlines.

She dips her pen again and writes the only truth she dares not say aloud: The Book is the whole of me — and I will write it as if truth itself were at stake.

The ribbon — opal-lilac, impossibly soft — twists itself into the Book’s spine and disappears … and the page turns.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “stake“.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.